


Traintracks

by TheModernChromatic



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: 1920s, Alternate Universe - 1920s, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, M/M, POV First Person, Soulmates, Tragic Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-01
Updated: 2014-08-01
Packaged: 2018-02-11 07:37:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2059557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheModernChromatic/pseuds/TheModernChromatic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>1920s AU, rovy's prompt</p>
            </blockquote>





	Traintracks

I knew he'd be mine from the second I saw him standing there. I could taste his cologne from across the room, the scent of it sitting heavy in my lungs and making my head swim.

All I could think about was finding the source of that smell. I wanted to find all the places on his skin where he'd dabbed it and draw a map of them with my tongue. He stood so casually, chewing on the end of a cigar and softly exhaling sweet smoke through his nostrils. He looked like he'd just stepped out of a catalog, but then his shoes also looked like they'd never touched the ground.

When I approached him, I chewed on my lip without thinking about it. He'd plucked his cigar from his mouth, blown a line of smoke my way and just watched it curl around me. He didn't bring it back to his lips. He just held it there, smoldering. It took him a moment to meet my eyes, but when he did it raised goosebumps all over my skin. Even in the low light of the smoky speakeasy, I could tell how sharp a blue they were. He held me in his gaze like a predator, just toying with prey. I'd stared back.

"Somethin' on my face?" He'd cooed. He looked like a million dollars, but I could tell by the way he was staring that he wasn't interested in being no dame's daddy. But that was still the impression. Daddy.

"Not yet," I'd said. I'd liked the way his eyebrows had shot to his hairline. It was gelled back, artistically in a way I could never get mine to stay, but a strand of it fell into his eyes.

When his face had relaxed again I could see a knowing smile curl into it. I felt a swell of pride when the man put his arm around me, asking myself if it'd really been that easy. Of course, it wasn't. He seemed the type to take explicit sampling before deciding, finally, on whether or not he wanted it. He was, most accurate to my suspicions, exceedingly explicit.

When he'd gotten me to his car, which may have been less luxurious than I'd perceived it to be at first, given how much I'd had to drink, he'd taken his time exploring. There's a certain rhythm to getting another man's clothing off, and he was definitely familiar with it. I didn't care. He pushed me to the edge without touching me, just watching with an amused smile. I’d merely piqued his interest while he had me wrapped around his finger. I remember how difficult it was to be patient while he looked over every inch he could get his hands on, ignoring the most sensitive areas and my pleas for affection. When he’d finally made his move, it was sudden and surprising, with him grabbing my hips and suddenly pulling me up to straddle his face. Well, at least he’d gotten my jibe about something on his face. He had me hitting my limit with his tongue alone and that was when I knew I was done for. I was his.

After his explicit sampling, he seemed to decide he wanted me after all. He told me I had a pretty mouth, then showed me how he wanted me to use it. I was intoxicated. There was the alcohol, yes, but then there was his scent, the taste of his skin, the way his eyes followed me everywhere I moved… I breathed and I breathed him.

Erwin.

He told me his name after I’d spent a week lounging around his house half-clothed and half-drunk. I’d called him daddy until then, and long after. It suited him. He called me sunshine until I told him mine. Always will.

I came to him every time, no matter what he called me. Sometimes he just looked at me so  I knew he wanted me and I came trotting up like a faithful dog. It may have seemed beneath me how easily I let him roll me over and own me, but I wanted it that way. I wanted him to own me, claim me with tooth and nail, to let our scents mingle until they were indistinguishable. I’m sure he knew that’s what I wanted and that’s why he owned me at first, almost disinterested. I was a puppy that had followed him home and it amused him to feed me.

Gradually that changed. Where before I would curl up beside him and he would ignore me or lightly pet me, it became more and more difficult for him to continue what he was doing when I was near him. I took pride in crawling into his lap, knowing he’d put down his newspaper to dote on me. At first, he hadn’t said much of anything to me, except to call me over when he wanted me. I liked watching him change. I went from an ornament in the room, on his lap, in his bed, to the only thing he could see. He was the only thing I could ever see, and soon we drowned out the rest of the world in each other.

I loved all of the things he called me. Once he started talking to me, he never stopped. I’d sit in his lap and watch him relax, sinking into ‘us’ rather than ‘me’. We were made for each other. I never knew living until he held me to his chest so I could feel his heartbeat. It was like there had never been a heart in my chest and when I felt his I was feeling a heartbeat for the first time. It was my heartbeat and it was his. He told me I was like breathing, like he couldn’t catch his breath unless he had his hands on me. When he did, I breathed easier, burying my nose in the spot on his neck where he dabbed his cologne. When I was with him, I sat in his lap and he worked his fingers into my hair and just talked. I was the lungs. He, the heart.

“Eren.”

His voice never sounded sweeter than when he said my name, like singing. I could feel it rumble in his throat and roll off his tongue like it was my throat, my tongue. He loved to talk with me near him, but still we could sit for hours saying nothing. I always found something amazing and new about him to love. I could run my thumbs over his cheekbones, feel their shape under my lips and then a week later, find a freckle there I hadn’t seen before. I’d let a laugh bubble up in my throat.

“This one’s new.” And I’d kiss the freckle to recognize its existence, commit it to memory.

“It’s your fault,” he tells me, only explaining when I cock my head at him. “Freckles are angel kisses.”

“I’m not an angel.”

“No? Then how did it get there?”

When I ran out of words, I’d slide my thumbs under his suspenders and slowly take him apart, piece by piece until there was nothing left of his million-dollar facade but the man underneath. He let me. At the same time, he’d peel me away too. There wasn’t much to me, I don’t think. My hair didn’t stay gelled like his did, and I could never find a pair of trousers that fit quite the way I wanted them to. There wasn’t much to me, and that’s how I lived until I met him. He became all there was to me. He was something other than wandering into speakeasies when it suited me and borrowing a puff of a good cigar when I could get it. I always felt more like myself seeing him without his million-dollar getup and being beside him without any of mine, like we were open and honest. Wherever he touched me, I knew who I was.

There was so much more to our intimacy than seeking out pleasure. Same as the hours spent memorizing his face, we spent hours familiarizing ourselves with each other’s bodies. I could spend so long caressing the taut surface of his skin and charting every part of him that I knew his body better than my own. In the end, neither body belonged to either of us. We were the same entity somehow split into two. My body was my own, but it was his and his was mine, but he owned it. We forgot there ever was anything aside from us after awhile.

Somehow, we stumbled back into the outside world, but even then there was nothing else but us. Our feet would start walking, trailing through grass and gravel, over pavement and past the city lights until we always ended up in the same place. In the dead of night, if we weren’t curled around one another in bed, we were always walking hand-in-hand across the metal tracks of the railroad just outside the city, he on one rail and me on the other, our hands suspended between us over the tracks. That was where we had our deepest conversations, in the overwhelming darkness of the night where we couldn’t tell where one of us ended and the other began.

“Hey, Erwin.”

“Hm?”

“Do you think there’s an end to evil in this world?”

“There’s an end to all things.”

Erwin had talked about evil before. We had no clear boundaries on good or evil, but we knew together was good and apart was not. Erwin had lived in England for a time--perhaps the worst time to live there. He’d been in the Great War. He told me he hadn’t breathed easy since seeing it, an endless sea of blood, walls of fire and the sounds of bullets echoing across space. The trenches. The barbedwire fields and the scent of death. Toxic gases that seemed to come from every direction when you expected them least. All of it had crushed the air out of his lungs and he hadn’t taken a breath since until he met me. I’ve never seen trenches or war. I breathe for him because all I care about is being with him.

“Eren?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you believe in soulmates?”

“Only since meeting you.”

That was the truth. Before, I’d only wandered wherever my feet took me. What was there to look forward to? There I lived in a world where stocks boomed around me, women were wild and in abundance, but I had no interest in money or women. I wanted no job, no house, and no family, so I had none. I stopped believing in love when my mother died and my father disappeared. Love and magic were synonymous, impossible, just dreams for children. The concept of a soulmate was laughable at best. My ability to love had slowly bled out of the cracks that were left behind from the last time someone loved me. Erwin had never seen that kind of rejection, loneliness. His heart beats and he loves for me because all he cares is that I love him back.

So I do.

In Erwin I found myself and he found me. That was all that mattered. From day to day we could hear the roar of the city everywhere we were but for the railroad. Still, he captivated me. There were times when I still felt like he only owned me and I had nothing I could do for him but let him, that the end would come on his terms. With every breath I took I felt like I cared more than he did and all he wanted was to breathe for awhile. But that wasn’t the case. He explained it to me completely.

“Breathing happens when you’re aware of it as often as when you’re not. You can breathe or not breathe at will, and you feel it, but your heart--” he’d taken my hand to place it on his chest where I could feel the soft thudding of his heart. “--is always beating, but often it’s hard to feel. Sometimes you need someone else to feel it for you to know it’s there.”

He taught me how to feel it. Whenever I doubted whether or not he loved me I knew to simply place my hand over his heart and feel it under my fingertips. Every beat seemed to spell it out for me. I love you.

It was an eternal high.

Life with Erwin happened in succession, a number of events that just flowed into one another. We lost track of the lives we used to have for the new one we’d found together. Were we who we were before, we might’ve stopped to wonder how miraculous it was for us to find one another and just suddenly vibrate at the same frequency. I lost my sense of self, but I found a new sense in Erwin and I never even missed what I had before. We stopped being able to relate to everyone around us. It felt as if we’d simply outgrown the world of people who lived as singular beings.

Once we’d gotten that into our minds, it became hard to even see the world as real. The only thing that was real to either of us was each other, ourselves. More and more, we found ourselves wandering to the railroad, walking across it. The time of day started to become insignificant as well. As long as we had each other, we had eternity.

I knew it was coming long before it happened. We had our eternity, but it was too much for this world. In the end, there was only ever one option. What more did the world have to offer us, keeping our singular soul divided into two bodies? We could never get close enough here. We talked about it hourly, clinging to one another and trying to get closer, closer. It wasn’t possible.

There were, as to be expected, never any trains in the dead of night when we prefered to walk the tracks. It was silent and the only sounds I could ever hear was my own breathing and the sound of Erwin’s heart echoing across space and reminding me how much he loved me. As we walked the tracks that night and I held his hand I could look up at the stars and just know. We’d begin our true eternity then.

“Eren, are you afraid?”

“I’m only afraid of being alone.”

“You’ll never be alone again.”

I hated the way the lights behind us getting closer had illuminated the space between us, as if to remind us that we were still separate beings.

“Is that a promise?”

He stepped from the rail into the center of the tracks, then pulled me down and cupped my head to his chest where I could hear his heart. Perhaps there was a whistle, but I heard none. I heard not the sound of wheels chugging over rails and smelled not the smoke or ash of an engine. Only one thing existed to me then.

“I promise.”

We stayed there until we finally truly found our eternity.

**Author's Note:**

> whups I started playing around with style and then it got away from me sorry if this was slightly confusing or spacey


End file.
